As 2006 winds-down and holidays are in full swing it means there’s not as much happening on the new API front. But, something’s happening. A couple new ones worth mentioning have been added during the lull:

FeedBlitz: FeedBlitz is a service that monitors blogs, RSS feeds and Web URLs to provide greater reach for feed publishers. This fall they introduced this good API for developers.

PBwiki: PBwiki claim to be the world’s largest consumer wiki farm. This early stage API allows programmatic access to wikis on their farm.

As noted yesterday, winning mashups have been announced for contests from both Rhapsody and our sponsor ClearForest. As with Rhapsody, the ClearForest team had good success in getting a very creative range of entries. Because the ClearForest API provides semantic textual analysis many of the mashups do interesting things by processing current news data.

Optevi News Tracker: First place winner. News Tracker allows for a new form of news reading — entity based navigation. It uses the ClearForest API to facilitate navigation by person, place, organization, company and other key elements. News Tracker’s entity cloud gives an overview of the news and allows you to quickly drill down to items of interest.

Hype List: Second place winner. An elegant interface combined with a simple focus on one thing. Who is hot today. Hype-list finds the people within entertainment, business and sports news and presents the hot names in an appealing and functionally simple interface.

Newsmakers of the Day: Third place winner. Mashup of ClearForest and Google Calendar. It places an unobtrusive icon at the top of each day. Click icon for snapshot of people, companies, products and locations in the news. You can drill down to the original news article.

Other honorable mentions included:

Six Degrees: Find the connection or six-degrees of separation between topics. Mashes RSS feeds with the ClearForest API. Offers REST and SOAP interfaces so you can build on top of it. All connections exposed through RDF.

PowerRSS: Power RSS is an RSS aggregator, which enables you to classify content in the article. The Power RSS will skim through the article and pick out the relevant articles, by analysing your interest categories.

Semantic Searcher: Speed reading for news. This site takes popular news feeds and extracts key terms. They are listed in order of popularity within the last 24 hours. The system uses Clear Forest SWS web service with related images via the Flickr API.

For Rhapsody, where I was one of the judges, there was diversity in how and where the mashups run. Take for example, the winning entry, Rhapsody Remote (which btw, won developer Aaron Murrell a trip for two anywhere in the world to see his favorite band). Aaron created a PC client and Pocket PC interface that turn the Pocket PC device into a remote control for Rhapsody. Here’s his explanation and you can see his mashup below:

Like many other subscribers, I love to listen to Rhapsody streams via an old computer connected to my home stereo. What I’ve been wanting for a long time is a way to avoid the hassle of getting up and messing with that computer to queue up a new set of songs, browse, and search through the Rhapsody catalog. Various hardware solutions and have approached this problem in many ways but often left core features lacking like searching music data outside of the music saved in your library, or playlists. Rhapsody Remote uses Rhapsody Web Services to allow you to search through the Rhapsody catalog, queue up songs and control the Rhapsody client software all from a WiFi connected handheld.

Other winners include:

Pamela Fox and Ben Lisbakken’s Music Mash, a Google Gadget that let’s you search Rhapsody’s catalog of millions of songs by their lyrics. You can also use it to find YouTube and Yahoo videos.

Derek Atlansky’s Rhapsody Scrobbler that monitors Rhapsody for tracks played and automatically submits them to the user’s Last.fm profile.

Nir Tzemah’s Rhapsody Top Feeds gadget that polls top songs and album feeds from Rhapsody RSS to let users stay on top of news about their favorite artists.

Quick pointer to a couple of interesting, thoughtful posts on mashups this week:

The growth of mashups continued throughout 2006: Dion Hinchcliffe does a good thorough review of the state of mashups today: lots of examples but lots of unanswered questions and models yet to be defined or proven (the “value proposition”), potential support issues, monetization questions, lack of tools as an obstacle to broader growth (and he draws good analogy to how tools and libraries helped spread Ajax like wildfire) but the promising advent of new tools like JackBe Presto and the recently profiled Kapow.

StumbleVideo - a sign of things to come: Where Microsoft’s Alex Barnett looks at the video market, the just-launched StumbleVideo and role APIs can play in service strategy given that StumbleVideo relies on web services like the YouTube API. He and I emailed earlier about this and I gave him a stat culled from the ProgrammableWeb database that I just haven’t had a chance to write about: there were 21 mashups tagged “video” in the first half of the year, and 52 so far in the second half. So, over twice as many per month using those APIs, essentially mirroring the rise in popularity of video online.

While the pace of new APIs over the past three weeks wasn’t up the nearly one per day rate the month before, there have been 26 added over the past 30 days. Included are APIs from big established providers and small startups. Below are a few of note with more coverage coming in the next few days:

Pingdom: Besides getting you urgent alerts if your website is down or otherwise at risk, the Pingdom web site monitoring service offers this API that lets you dig directly into that monitoring data for detailed status and analysis.

WikiMatrix: If you are comparing wiki software you can use this API to pull data from their DB of wiki product information

Twitter: An API for “the global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?”

Moodgeist: Moodgeist is an experiment to show what is currently happening in the Skype Land and the Skype community collective state of mind. It tracks the text that Skype Users put in their mood. From this it extracts YouTube URLs and shows them.

Wii Seeker: A mashup to help consumers locate a Nintendo Wii. Provides retail addresses, locations, shipment dates, and local eBay auctions. See also the sister sites PS3 Seeker and BidNearBy, the latter lets you search local auctions and Craigslist listings and see where they are located on a map view.

If you’re here on the ProgrammableWeb site or subscribing to this blog there’s a pretty good chance you have at least a passing interest in what new and notable in the mashup space. Now there’s another way for you to see what’s happening: the handy new Mashup of the Day Google gadget (known internally as the “motd gadget”).

Each day it gives you the visual thumbnail and short summary of that day’s best mashup. The link at the bottom gives the count of new mashups. (FYI, Google has a very smart and helpful gadgets team.)

Of course since any RSS feed can be a gadget as well, you can opt for the text-only version that includes the full list of that day’s new links:

New mashups are published at ProgrammableWeb 7 days a week 365 days are year. The new Google Gadget is one more way to get the latest.